Whether
you love it or hate it, the majority of the world's corporations
depend on Microsoft's Office software suite. Whether it is typing
something up on Word or compiling data in Excel, many of us use a
version of Office every day.

Microsoft's latest version,
Office 2010, is supposed to be released
in June. There are six different editions, all of which will come
in 64-bit versions for the first time. There will also be a limited
free edition that will be supported
by ads. Retail pricing
will be similar to that of older versions of Office.

Office
2010 hit the Open
Beta stage in November, with thousands of eager users
downloading the 684MB software package. Microsoft has now moved on to
the Release Candidate stage, but is deploying this initial version to
a select few.

DailyTech
received confirmation via Microsoft's PR agency: "Microsoft made
a release candidate available to members in the Technology Adoption
Program (TAP). This is one of Microsoft's planned milestones in the
engineering process; however they do not have plans to make this new
code set available broadly".

It appears likely that there
may be another Release Candidate version for the public at a later
time. Corporate adoption of Office 2010 is expected to be slow as
Microsoft becomes a victim of its own success. Many users are happy
with Office 2007, and mass deployments of Office 2010 are likely to
be 64-bit editions rolling out with 64-bit
editions of Windows 7 at the same time.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

pre-release upgrade to pre-release is rarely supported. It's not a scenario that will exist after the product is released so no testing resources are allocated.

Being untested if you run into a bug there is no guarantee it's not related to the upgrade process rather than an actual bug. There is already too much "noise" (flood of bug reports) during software development. The additional burden on some download servers is well worth eliminating some of this "noise".